Leonard Pitts has read “Hillbilly Elegy”
His name doesn’t even appear in the book.
But make no mistake. “Hillbilly Elegy,” the new bestseller by J.D. Vance, is, in a very real sense, about Donald Trump. More to the point, it’s about the people who have made his unlikely run for the presidency possible.
To these folks, poverty is the family tradition — their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and mill workers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.”
In other words, Vance’s people are Trump’s base. And the book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand Trump’s appeal. “Hillbilly Elegy” is a compelling and compassionate portrait of a people politicians seldom address and media seldom reflect.
They love Trump because he sees them.
Let me say something that I’ve never said before about Leonard Pitts: That’s bullshit.
Hillbilly Elegy is a well-written book, but the way it’s being treated as the definition of a whole swath of America isn’t just wrong-headed, it’s disgusting. It’s a book about a handful of characters. It’s no more definitive of the whole great center of the nation than the liner notes on a Stanley Brothers album. Probably a lot less so.
I know we are in a season where it’s GD fashionable to pick up Vance’s book and suddenly proclaim that you have seen into the heart of what’s happening for the poor folk in poor old Rust-alachia. I know because every damn pundit, talking head, and sympathetic radio voice who’s never come within a hundred miles of the Ohio River seems to be engaged in the activity. Stop it. Just stop it.
I grew up in Kentucky, in a tiny town where the heart-shaped signs proudly said “The Heart of the Coalfield.” Both my grandfathers worked at the mines. My father in law worked at the mines. I worked at the mines, and I pushed a broom to get by, and I once ran through a cornfield while shotgun pellets tore through the corn because I’d stumbled on a hidden still. You think I don’t know hillbillies? I’ve seen the mines close. I’ve seen the stores close. I’ve seen the Walmarts eat up every business for thirty miles and men that stood tall even when they were underground, stooped-over while wearing a blue greeter’s vest.
And the story that Vance tells? It’s not me. It’s not anyone I know. It’s not my family, my friends, my hometown. It’s not the guys who stayed in the mines, or the guys who got out. His book is his experience. That’s all it is.
Oh, and Vance’s contention that the hatred for Obama in Appalachia has nothing to do with race? That’s such overwhelming bullshit I’m surprised the smell doesn’t keep Vance up at night. It’s so idiotic, that it makes me doubt the book’s value even in relaying personal stories.
There’s a word for when you take a very few people and project their attitudes onto a whole group of people: bigotry. What’s happening in the middle of the continent is not that damn simple, no matter how satisfying that would be. Stop trying to make it fit some neat, 300-pages and done mold.
Okay, consider that little demon exorcised. Come on in. Let’s see what else is going on.
Dana Milbank on why Trump isn’t just another bad candidate.
My recent columns on Donald Trump have generated a consistent response from his supporters:
“Why don’t you just admit that your lips are super-glued to Hillary’s ass?”
“Keep preaching to the Hillary choir.”
“Please notify me when you are going to write your column on the lies of Hillary Clinton. Oh, excuse me, that’s not happening is it?”
“If . . . that lying psycho b---- wins, there will be nothing left of this country. You better stock up on bullets to protect your house!”
Hang on … are you sure you’re not looking at my email? Or my Twitter replies?
Moderates and reasonable Republicans who are considering voting for Trump portray it as a choice between two unpalatable options. But it isn’t. It’s a choice between one unpalatable option and one demagogue who operates outside of our democratic traditions, promoting racism, condoning violence and moving paranoia into the mainstream. This presidential election, unlike the six others I have covered, is not about party or ideology. It’s about Trump’s threat to our tradition of self-government.
Well said. The worst that can be said about Hillary Clinton? She’ll give you more years like those you just got from Obama. The worst that can be said about Trump? You won’t get more years.
Sing it, Mr. Cash,
And I looked and behold: a pale horse.
And his name, that sat on him, was Trump.
Close enough.
Tom Korologos and Richard Allen and the epitaph for GOP 2016.
The phrase “desperate times call for desperate measures” is attributed to Hippocrates. Now is the time for the Republican Party to take decisive, perhaps desperate, measures if it is going to survive. Republicans must look past the 2016 presidential election and start planning for the 2018 and 2020 comebacks. …
It appears a political landslide will sweep the country. That’s not all bad. The larger the margin, the greater the chances a Clinton administration will overplay its hand, handing Republicans a clear opportunity to repair the damage in 2018 and 2020.
The plan Korologos and Allen present? Why it’s completely new and radical.
With a Republican House, attention-getting hearings can be held every week on the inevitable missteps in a Clinton administration. The domestic scene, from the economy to health care to trade to infrastructure, will quickly ripen for congressional oversight.
Gee. Never ending Congressional hearings in an attempt to create scandal out of the ordinary actions of government. Why didn’t Republicans think of this before?
What this article really shows? How Democrats should start planning now to reverse the usual loss of House seats in an off-year election. Start your 2018 engines, folks.
Kathleen Parker is hip-deep in metaphors.
Donald Trump. Would that it were unnecessary to mention his name except, say, as a Viagra pitchman.
Donald Trump doesn’t take little blue pills. He takes big pills. The biggest!
… the enchanted evening Republicans fantasized when they nominated the biggest goofball ever to enter the Oval Office sweepstakes is over. The clock has struck midnight, the carriage is ablaze; the golden-haired prince is a bloated chimney sweep ranting at rooftops. The party’s footmen, blind mice begging for scraps of mercy, scatter in search of cover.
Even Rep. Mark Sanford, the disgraced former governor of South Carolina, took to the quill, writing in a New York Times op-ed that he might no longer support Trump if he doesn’t produce his tax returns. Knowing with 99 percent certainty that this won’t happen, Sanford has carved a tiny escape hole in the baseboard for himself.
Parker’s point (eventually) is that there are fewer Trump fans than the polls would indicate—but the ranks are swelled with the people who have been taught to hate Hillary.
Frank Bruni on the singular lack of success found by the tiny Trump-a-likes.
In his race against Marco Rubio to become the Republican nominee for one of Florida’s two seats in the Senate, the rich, brash homebuilder Carlos Beruff could not be welding himself more tightly to Donald Trump. ...
Polls put him anywhere from 30 to 60 points behind Rubio in the primary, which takes place Tuesday. He trailed by double-digit margins even before Trump wanly and dutifully signaled support for Rubio earlier this month.
Pretty much the same story in every other place where there’s a Trump-sponsored candidate. So please, Donald, do remember to embrace down-ticket Republicans in the fall. Please?
The Washingont Post is not engaging in both-sides-ism.
We could write that both presidential candidates talked about race last Thursday, and we wouldn’t be wrong — but it wouldn’t really be an accurate portrayal, either. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton delivered a thoughtful and well-documented indictment of her opponent’s embrace of racist themes and his legitimization of previously fringe racist groups. Republican nominee Donald Trump, like a middle-schooler crying “I know what you are, but what am I,” retorted, without evidence or argumentation, that Ms. Clinton is a “bigot.”
The contrast points to a wider challenge of this presidential campaign, for journalists and voters alike. It’s important to hold both candidates to high standards, and in a number of areas we believe Ms. Clinton is falling short. Yet in most of those areas Mr. Trump is so far from even minimal compliance with the expectations people have set for political leaders over the years that it is hard to put them in the same conversation.
It’s too bad that the one falling short most often is the media, which insists on reporting this campaign season like any other, even if that means ignoring 90% of what one of the candidates says and allowing “surrogates” to try and twist some sense from the other 10%.
And then pretending that both sides are the same.
The New York Times and Trump’s racism trumpet.
In A major speech Thursday, Hillary Clinton linked Donald Trump to bigoted elements on the fringe of American politics. But she got it wrong when she said, “Trump is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters.”
It’s not a “dog whistle” if everyone can hear the bigotry.
Republicans supporting Mr. Trump, explicitly or tacitly, cannot reasonably claim that they do not know who he is and what he has been doing.
Wait? Was that Camptown Races? Oh, wait, I can name that tune. It’s Dixie.
Colbert King has been thinking deeply about the shallow.
A week’s worth of daily meditation readings in the publication “Forward Day by Day” put me in a different frame of mind as I approached today’s column. “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil . . . then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday” was one of the scripture passages. “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” was another. ...
And then I thought of Donald Trump.
There went the noonday sun.
Despite attempts to see things more clearly, Trump as darkness is not a notion easily dispelled.
Don’t think too hard about Trump. After all, it’s all Trump thinks about, and look what it’s done to him.
Bryce Covert on how bad things were at Fox, and how sad it is that Fox is far from unique.
The details both women lay out portray Fox as a place where sexual harassers roam free, grabbing or ogling whatever they fancy, with consequences brought to bear only on the victims who speak up.
But it would be wrong to think of Fox as an anachronism or even an outlier. Sexual harassment permeates the economy — it makes up an enormous share of complaints to workplace watchdogs and crops up in both low-wage restaurant jobs and high-paid tech offices. Fox is, in many ways, a typical workplace.
We know what Trump and Bannon still support Ailes, has anyone asked Conway what you thinks?
Tom Steyer worries that the climate may now be changing faster than we can, even if we try.
July was the hottest month in recorded history, by a lot, and August isn’t looking any better. So how do we interpret that? What does it mean?
… if scientists start to project a dramatically shorter timeline for the impacts of climate change, any comfortable replacement scenario becomes something much more daunting. If we don’t have the decades needed for the vast bulk of our productive capacity to be replaced in the normal course, we would need to replace assets that had not reached the end of their usable lives — and that would affect industries beyond purely oil and gas.
Regardless of the scientific projections, we cannot afford to repeat the painfully slow and politically motivated dance of the past 10 years.
We’ve been extraordinarily lucky. Just as it’s becoming clear that things are moving even faster than we thought and the level of CO2 may be triggering additional mechanisms that will burst through old projections, coal use has declined sharply and with it CO2. And we’ve been extraordinarily unlucky. The reason coal is down isn’t because we’re being sensible. It’s because fracking has made natural gas suddenly cheap and abundant. We’ve made improvements, but we’ve also laid a flood under those improvements by switching to another fossil fuel.
Just what would a crash program to gain real progress look like? The cost of solar and wind is still sloping down, but barring a breakthrough, we can’t expect the market to take us to the next step unaided.
The New York Times has one big, blue solution for how we might make faster progress on clean energy.
The first offshore wind farm in American waters, near Block Island, R.I., was completed this month. With just five turbines, the farm won’t make much of a dent in the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels, but it shows the promise this renewable energy source could have. When the turbines start spinning in November, they will power the island, which currently relies on diesel generators, and will also send electricity to the rest of Rhode Island.
Putting windmills offshore, where the wind is stronger and more reliable than on land, could theoretically provide about four times the amount of electricity as is generated on the American grid today from all sources. This resource could be readily accessible to areas on the coasts, where 53 percent of Americans live.
Just a note: Donald Trump predicted in 2013 that people would stop putting up wind turbines by 2016. 2014 was the record year for new wind power. Until 2015 topped it by 20%. The numbers for 2016 aren’t in yet. It must be painful for Trump to be right all the time.
Douglas Brinkley on President Obama’s largest achievement … by several thousand square miles.
President Obama seems most comfortable outside on an 18-hole golf course, not hunting bear in Colorado, as Theodore Roosevelt did while president in 1905, or deep-sea fishing for tarpon in the Texas Gulf, as Franklin D. Roosevelt, an avid angler, did on a getaway from the White House in 1937.
Yet as president, Mr. Obama has visited more than 30 national parks and emerged as a 21st-century Theodore Roosevelt for his protection of public lands and marine reserves. His use of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which gives a president unilateral authority to protect federal lands as national monuments, has enabled him to establish 23 new monuments, more than any other president, and greatly expand a few others.
I’m so very pleased with this. I’m going to make it a personal goal to visit the Obama 23. Don’t worry. I’ll take pictures.
On Wednesday, he set aside some 87,000 acres of federal land along the Penobscot River in north-central Maine as the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. The action will safeguard the wild country around the 5,267-foot Mount Katahdin, the state’s highest peak. Then, on Friday, he announced a fourfold expansion of a marine monument designated by President George W. Bush off the coast of Hawaii.
I’ve hiked the south end of the Appalachian Trail, but I’ve never tackled the north. This seems like a great time to think about the 100-mile Wilderness, and stumbling out of the black woods to gaze up at Katahdin. Let’s pencil that in for next year. Who’s with me?